Fox News and ex-anchor Ed Henry ask judge to throw out lurid sexual harassment case

MANHATTAN (CN) — Fox News and former “America’s Newsroom” co-host Ed Henry urged a federal judge on Tuesday to toss out a civil sexual harassment suit filed by former Fox employee Jennifer Eckhart more than four years ago.

Eckhart, a former associate producer for Fox Business Network, sued Fox News in July 2020, claiming the network was aware of her accusations of sexual misconduct against Henry since 2017, but only fired him to get ahead of her looming lawsuit, which accused Henry of violently raping her in a midtown Manhattan hotel room in 2017.

Opening with a “Trigger Warning,” her complaint against the former Fox News anchor and White House correspondent included graphic text messages about sex and domination.

Even though Fox News fired Henry in 2020 after an external sexual misconduct investigation, the company says it is not liable for Eckhart’s sexual harassment and retaliation claims against the company.

Lawyers for Fox News argued Eckhart’s retaliation claims against the company should be thrown out on summary judgmentbecause she never filed any sexual harassment complaints for Fox News to purportedly retaliate against through firing her.

Fox says the company had sufficient “well-documented performance deficiencies” to justify Eckhart’s non-retaliatory firing in June 2020, twenty months after her last conversation with Henry.

Kathleen M. McKenna, a Proskauer Rose attorney for Fox News, said the news company had suspended Henry and sent him to sex rehab therapy because of extramarital affair with a stripper that drew negative publicity, but it had never received any information that would have put the company on notice that Henry sexually harassed Eckhart.

“Employers are not required to monitor employees private sex lives,” she said in court on Tuesday.

She noted that Fox News fired Eckhart in 2020 prior to her making the accusations tied to Henry.

Represented by Wigdor attorney Michael J. Willemin, Eckhart argued that it was “implausible” that Fox News only ordered Henry attend sex rehab therapy because of that one extramarital affair, and they were probably aware of the anchor’s “proclivity for inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.”

“It is more likely than not that Fox News executives knew some of the stuff that was going on,” he said in court on Tuesday.

Willemin said Henry enticed Eckhart into sex by telling her her that he could get her in a room with powerful network decision makers and that she should stop wasting her time working behind the scenes as a production assistant and become a “star.”

Henry’s defense attorney Eden Quainton said on rebuttal that it should be evident on the full factual record before the court on summary judgment that Eckhart and Henry were voluntarily “sexting” and having sex with each other, which should extinguish any hostile work environment claims.

“The only thing that is clear after four years of litigation, millions of dollars in legal fees, countless hours of deposition and document review, is that Jennifer has no case,” Henry says in a motion for summary judgment. “There are no facts to support Jennifer’s claim that Ed lured Jennifer into sex with promises of fame or fortune, when the record is clear that she was the one inviting explicit sexual advances from Ed, she was the party who eagerly teased, excited, aroused and encouraged Ed, she was she was the person who chased and pursued—all both before and after events she now characterizes as ‘rape’ and ‘assault.’”

Henry, now a chief anchor at Fox News competitor Newsmax, insists that text messages in the court’s full record on summary judgment demonstrate how Eckhart initiated and completely encouraged a consensual relationship where, his lawyer says, she the “enticer” to the bedroom dalliances.

U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams did not immediately rule from the bench on motions for summary judgment at the conclusion of oral arguments on Tuesday, but promised a ruling “shortly."

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